J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter is a book about a chosen boy who goes to a magical school. This book has sold in over 400 million copies. But without one very special woman this would have never been possible. This special woman is named Joanne Rowling, also known as J.K. Rowling.

 Joanne Rowling was born 31 July 1965 in Yate, England close to Bristol. She wrote a lot of fantasy stories that she read to her sister when she was young. She wrote down her first story when she was about 6 years old and it was about a rabbit called Rabbit. She went to school at ”St Michael's Primary School”. There she had a headmaster named Alfred Dunn who probably was an inspiration to the headmaster at Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore, in Harry Potter. She attended secondary school at "Wyedean School and College". The character Hermoine, in Harry Potter, is a reflection of how Joanne was during the age of eleven. The character Ron Weasley was inspired by her best friend, during secondary school, Sean Harris. She later went to university at "University of Exeter" and studied a year in France. When she was finished with her studying she moved to London to work as a researcher and multilingual secretary for Amnesty International. In 1990 she was travelling by train from Manchester to London. The train got delayed for four hours and it was then Joanne got the idea of a story about a boy attending a school for wizards. In an interview with “The Boston Globe” she told them that she has no idea of where the ideas came from, but the characters and situations were filling her head. When she finally got to her flat she immediately started to write it down. In December the same year her mother past away after suffering from MS for ten years. According to Joanne this affected her writing and made her write more details about Harry’s loss of his parents. Joanne later moved to Porto in Portugal where she taught English. She later married a man named Jorge Arantes which she had one child with named Jessica. This relationship ended about a year after the marriage and Joanne brought Jessica with her to Scotland, to live close to Joanne’s sister. During this time she suffered from depression and had suicide thoughts. This gave her the idea of the soul-sucking creatures in the third Harry Potter book.

Before she published her books about Harry Potter her publishers advised her to use two initials instead of her name because they thought that the books wouldn’t sell well if people saw that a woman had written them. Because she only had one name plus her surname she used her grandmothers name “Kathleen”. That is why she i...